Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel (Paperback)

By Rainer Maria Rilke 
Translated by Edward Snow 

"This book has been central for many young poets, in many languages, for generations. Now, Edward Snow has created a fresh, inviting version in English."― Robert Pinsky

"The Notebooks matches the literary heights of Rilke’s finest verse…Edward Snow’s new translation is an opportunity to revisit this elusive masterpiece."― Ratik Asokan, Nation

A stunning, revelatory new translation of the only novel by one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, from one of “the most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke’s contemporary translators”―Michael Dirda, Washington Post

A groundbreaking masterpiece of early European modernism originally published in 1910, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge unspools the vivid reflections of the titular young Danish nobleman and poet. From his Paris garret, Brigge records his encounters with the city and its outcasts, muses on his family history, and lays bare his earliest experiences of fear, tenderness, and desolation.

With a poet’s feel for language and a keen instinct for storytelling, Rainer Maria Rilke forges a dazzlingly fractured coming-of-age narrative, kaleidoscopic in its alternation of vivid present encounters and equally alive memories of childhood. Strikingly contemporary, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge reveals a writer metabolizing his own experiences to yield still-essential questions about fiction and reality, empathy and psychosis, and―above all―life, love, and death.

In a fascinating introduction, award-winning translator Edward Snow explores the overlaps between Rilke’s experiences and those of his protagonist, and shows with granular attention the novel’s capacity for nuance and sympathy. Snow’s exquisite translation captures as never before the astonishing cadences and musical clarity of the poet’s prose. It reveals The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as an urgent contemporary achievement, more than one hundred years after it was written.

Paperback
256 pages
W.W. Norton & Company, 2023
Originally published in 1910
5.5 x 8.3 inches
ISBN 9781324066088
Literary Fiction